A lavishly illustrated and lively introduction to a unique American Jewish community.

Traces the steps of Florida's Jewish pioneers from colonial times through the present through the historical sites in each county that reflect their heritage.

Literary Nonfiction. Jewish Studies. History. 2017 Florida Book Award, Phillip and Dana Zimmerman Gold Medal for Florida Nonfiction. The dramatic story of South Florida's oldest Jewish community and a major addition to the history of this unique island city. Long before Miami was on the map, Key West had Florida's largest economy and an influential Jewish community. Jews who settled here as peddlers in the nineteenth century joined a bilingual and progressive city that became the launching pad for the revolution that toppled the Spanish Empire in Cuba. As dozens of local Jews collaborated with José Martí's rebels, they built relationships that supported thriving Jewish communities in Key West and Havana at the turn of the twentieth century. During the 1920s, when anti-immigration hysteria swept the United States, Key West's Jews resisted the immigration quotas and established "the southernmost terminal of the Jewish underground," smuggling Jewish aliens in small boats across the Florida Straits to safety in Key West. But these and other Jewish exploits were kept secret as Ku Klux Klan leaders infiltrated local law enforcement and government. Many Jews left Key West during the 1930s and their stories were ignored or forgotten by the mythmakers that reinvented Key West as a tourist mecca. Arlo Haskell's THE JEWS OF KEY WEST is an entertaining and authoritative account of Key West's Jewish community from 1823-1969. Illustrated with over 100 images, it brings to life a history that had long been forgotten.

"A must-read for anyone interested in the history of civil rights, the roles and varied motivations of southern Jews in the movement, the interaction of blacks and Jews, the role of hate-groups and the anti-communist hysteria in silencing or harassing the forces of positive change, and the specific place of Miami, Miami Beach, and Florida in the struggle. Raymond Mohl's writing style is dynamic and fully accessible for the lay as well as scholarly audience that I expect this work will attract."--Mark K. Bauman, Atlanta Metropolitan College Using unusual and revealing primary materials from the careers of two remarkable Jewish women, Raymond Mohl offers an original interpretation of the role of Jewish civil rights activists in promoting racial change in post-World War II Miami. He describes the city's political climate after the war as characterized by segregation, aggressive anti-Semitism, and a powerful strain of cold war McCarthyism. In this hostile environment the dynamic leadership of two northern newcomers, Matilda "Bobbi" Graff and Shirley M. Zoloth, played a critical role in the city's campaign for racial reform. Working with the Miami chapter of the Civil Rights Congress, established in 1948, Graff was instrumental in the organization's stand against the Ku Klux Klan, its protests against lynchings and police brutality, and its work with Florida's black civil rights leaders such as Harry T. Moore. With the Miami Congress of Racial Equality, Zoloth helped to launch a lunch counter sit-in campaign (a year before the more famous student sit-ins of 1960) that ultimately resulted in the desegregation of downtown public accommodations. This analysis of the movement between 1945 and 1960 substantiates a new but now dominant interpretation of civil rights history that sees grassroots action as the powerful engine that drove racial change. It emphasizes the major role played by women in the cause and documents the variety of civil rights experiences of Jews who migrated to Miami in large numbers during the mid-century decades. Committed to social justice, they built activist organizations, challenged segregationists and anti-Semites, and worked with black activists to break down Jim Crow barriers. Original documents written by both women, including Graff's autobiographical memoir, demonstrate a level of Jewish activism, especially by women, that was unique for the time and place--the postwar American South. Their own words vividly describe fear, harassment, family and community pressures, government intrigue, and individual betrayal. As Mohl's groundbreaking history illustrates, the perseverance of these women and their small band of supporters is a testament to their strength and an inspiration for continued reform in America. Raymond A. Mohl, professor of history at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, is the editor of Searching for the Sunbelt: Historical Perspectives on a Region and the coeditor of The New African-American Urban History and Urban Policy in Twentieth-Century America

“Excuse me, are you Jewish?” With these words, the relentlessly cheerful, ideologically driven emissaries of Chabad-Lubavitch approach perfect strangers on street corners throughout the world in their ongoing efforts to persuade their fellow Jews to live religiously observant lives. In The Rebbe’s Army, award-winning journalist Sue Fishkoff gives us the first behind-the-scenes look at this small Brooklyn-based group of Hasidim and the extraordinary lengths to which they take their mission of outreach. They seem to be everywhere—in big cities, small towns, and suburbs throughout the United States, and in sixty-one countries around the world. They light giant Chanukah menorahs in public squares, run “Chabad houses” on college campuses from Berkeley to Cambridge, give weekly bible classes in the Capitol basement in Washington, D.C., run a nonsectarian drug treatment center in Los Angeles, sponsor the world’s biggest Passover Seder in Nepal, establish synagogues, Hebrew schools, and day-care centers in places that are often indifferent and occasionally hostile to their outreach efforts. They have built a billion-dollar international empire, with their own news service, publishing house, and hundreds of Websites. Who are these people? How successful are they in making Jews more observant? What influence does their late Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson (who some thought was the Messiah), continue to have on his followers? Fishkoff spent a year interviewing Lubavitch emissaries from Anchorage to Miami and has written an engaging and fair-minded account of a Hasidic group whose motives and methodology continue to be the subject of speculation and controversy.

Latin American Jewish Studies Association Best Edited Volume This volume explores the local specificities and global forces that shaped Jewish experiences in the Americas across five centuries. Featuring a range of case studies by scholars from the United States, Brazil, Europe, and Israel, it explores the culturally, religiously, and politically diverse lives of Jewish minorities in the Western Hemisphere. The chapters are organized chronologically and trace four global forces: the western expansion of early modern European empires, Jewish networks across and beyond empires, migration, and Jewish activism and participation in international ideological movements. The volume weaves together into one narrative the histories of communities and individuals separated by time and space, such as the descendants of Portuguese converts, Moroccan immigrants to Brazil, and U.S.-based creators of Yiddish movies. Through its transnational focus and close attention paid to local circumstances, this volume offers new insights into the multicultural pasts of the Americas’ Jewish populations and of the different regions that make up North, Central, and South America. Contributors: Lenny A. Ureña Valerio | Elisa Kriza | Raanan Rein | Adriana M. Brodsky | Lucas de Mattos Moura Fernandes | Katalin Franciska Rac | Zachary M Baker | Neil Weijer | Hilit Surowitz-Israel | Isabel Rosa Gritti | Tamar Herzog | Jose C Moya | Sandra McGee Deutsch | Dana Rabin Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

"Forget the jokes about late ‘70s South Beach being the Yiddish-speaking section of “God’s Waiting Room”; yes, upwards of 20,000 elderly Jews made up nearly half of its population in those days — all crammed into an area of barely two square miles like a modern-day shtetl, the small, tightly knit Eastern European villages that defined so much of pre-World War II Jewry. But these New York transplants and Holocaust survivors all still had plenty of living, laughing and loving to do, as strikingly portrayed in Shtetl in the Sun, which features previously unseen photographs documenting South Beach’s once-thriving and now-vanished Jewish world — a project that American photographer Andy Sweet (1953–82) began in 1977 after receiving his MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and a driving passion until his tragic death"--Publisher's description.

Being Jewish in Brazil--the world's largest Catholic country--is fraught with paradoxes, and living in São Paulo only amplifies these vivid contradictions. The metropolis is home to Jews from over 60 countries of origin, and to the Hebraica, the world’s largest Jewish athletic and social club. Jewish identity is rooted in layered experiences of historical and contemporary dispersal and border crossings. Brazil is famously tolerant of difference but less understanding of longings for elsewhere. Celebrating both Carnival and the High Holidays is but one example of how Jews in São Paulo hold themselves together as a community in the face of the forces of assimilation. Misha Klein’s fascinating ethnography reveals the complex intertwining of Jewish and Brazilian life and identity.

Between ten and fifteen thousand persons of Cuban-Jewish heritage currently live in Miami. Until now, however, this vibrant community and its unique traditions have, to a large extent, escaped the notice of ethnographers, historians, and other scholars. In Cuban-Jewish Journeys, Caroline Bettinger-López remedies that neglect with an engaging, in-depth look at a people whose rich mix of cultures confounds typical ethnic images. The author begins by investigating the history and development of the Cuban-Jewish community, tracing its origins back to Jewish enclaves in Eastern Europe, Russia, and the Mediterranean. She explores how these people came to Cuba in the first half of the twentieth century and how they eventually resettled in the United States as part of the larger Cuban migration that followed Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution. In recounting this history, Bettinger-López draws heavily on numerous stories told to her by Cuban Jews in Miami and elsewhere. Those oral histories also form the basis of Bettinger-López's subsequent exploration of the identity and assimilation issues facing "Jewbans" (as many in Miami began calling themselves in the 1970s). She found that place and date of birth, for instance, may affect an individual's identification with a particular homeland and political ideology, which may in turn influence how the individual "remembers" Cuban-Jewish history. The future of Miami's Jewban community, she suggests, now lies in the hands of a generation that, for the most part, has grown up within the United States. Already, the community is transforming itself linguistically, culturally, and religiously to accommodate the younger generation. Skillfully interweaving historical analysis, personal reflections, inter-generational stories, theories of diaspora, photographs, and current debates on ethnographic writing, Cuban-Jewish Journeys will appeal not only to scholars but to anyone interested in the ever-changing face of multicultural America. The Author: Caroline Bettinger-López, a native of Miami, studied anthropology at the University of Michigan. Since her graduation, she has worked in various teaching and social-service positions in Miami. Most recently, she has taught disadvantaged children in Haiti.

In the years following the founding of the State of Israel, close to a million Jews became refugees fleeing their ancestral homelands in the Middle East, North Africa, and Iran. State-sanctioned discrimination, violence, and political unrest brought an abrupt end to these once vibrant communities, scattering their members to the four corners of the earth. Their stories are mostly untold. Sephardi Voices: The Forgotten Exodus of the Arab Jews is a window into the experiences of these communities and their stories of survival. Through gripping first-hand accounts and stunning portrait and documentary photography, we hear on-the-ground stories of pogroms in Libya and Egypt, the burning of synagogues in Syria, the terrible Farhud in Iraq, families escaping via the great airlifts of the Magic Carpet and Operations Ezra and Nehemiah, husbands smuggled in carpets into Iran in search of wives. The authors also provide crucial historical background for these events, as well as updates on the lives of some of these Sephardi Jews who have gone on to rebuild fortunes in London and New York, write novels, and win Nobel Prizes. Sephardi Voices is at once a wide-ranging and intimate story of a large-scale catastrophe and a portrait of the vulnerability of the passage of time.